Orrery diagram art — the "sketched Wired" style

The house style for editorial diagrams across Orrery — The Long View essays now, and the /science section later (same pipeline, same look, so the whole atlas reads as one hand). Locked with Marko, July 2026.

Reference implementations: the Navigation essay (first pass) and delta-v (first pass in this style). The sources live under docs/wip/essay-diagram-sources/<slug>/*.svg.

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The pipeline (SVG sketch → Higgsfield art)

1. Author a precise SVG sketch — the compositional + factual truth. Deterministic, in-palette, every label + number in place. Build script pattern: scripts/essays/build-<slug>-sketches.mjs (mirror build-nav-diagram-sketches.mjs). Rasterise each to a 2048-px PNG with sharp. Output to docs/wip/essay-diagram-sources/<slug>/ (NOT the shipped static/ tree).
2. Upload each PNG to Higgsfield (media_upload → PUT the presigned URL → media_confirm).
3. Generate with nano_banana_pro, aspect_ratio: "16:9", resolution: "2k", passing the sketch as medias: [{ value: <media_id>, role: "image" }] and the style prompt below (swap in the per-diagram subject + labels).
4. Download the raw art, convert to static/images/essays/<slug>/<name>.webp (sharp().resize(1600).webp({ quality: 86 })).
5. Wire the figure blocks into the essay overlay + set hero in the base (see scripts/essays/wire-nav-figures.mjs). align: 'wide'.

The palette

Deep midnight-navy ground #0a0e18 · luminous cyan linework #7fb0e0 · warm-cream highlights #cfe3fb/white · a single warm-amber glow #ffd27f for a Sun/star/key accent. Faint blueprint grid + printed-paper grain ghosted behind. Monospace/hand lettering.

The locked style prompt (the "blend")

A blend of elegant hand-sketched (spare, atmospheric, glowing amber accent) and engineering-notebook (ghosted blueprint grid, hand-lettered callouts). Use verbatim, substituting the bracketed parts:

Reinterpret this schematic as a hand-drawn editorial feature illustration for WIRED magazine — art-directed, not a clean computer diagram. Elegant, confident hand-sketched ink linework with light cross-hatching and a few loose construction strokes; hand-lettered annotations that feel drawn, not typed. Deep midnight-navy ground with subtle printed-paper grain and a faint blueprint grid ghosted behind the art; luminous cyan linework, warm-cream highlights, a single warm-amber glow accent. Spare, atmospheric, sophisticated — a beautiful magazine science spread, not busy. KEEP the geometry + these key labels legible and in place: [list every heading, label and number]. Not photorealistic, not a flat vector chart. Subject: [one-line description of what the diagram shows].

Why the label list matters: this is a museum-grade atlas — the numbers and names must survive the restyle. Always enumerate them in the prompt; if the art garbles one, regenerate rather than ship it.

Reference-first, not text-only. Always pass the SVG sketch as the reference image — it carries the layout so the art stays correct while the style goes loose.

Heroes vs inline

• Diagram-hero (e.g. delta-v's mass-budget bar) — generate like any diagram.
• Photo figures — reuse vetted missions/<id>/NN or fleet-galleries/… imagery (no generation), honest mission-level captions + credit. Don't newly source.
• Bespoke photo-hero — a single text-to-image piece with NO reference sketch and NO text in the image (see Navigation's lone-craft hero).

Reusing for /science

Same prompt, same palette, same pipeline. A /science concept diagram is authored as an SVG sketch (the section's key figure), then run through this style so the essays and the science overlays share one visual language.